Becoming Jane Eyre (17 page)

“I’ll be guided by your wishes in this,” Charlotte says, pursing her lips. She can hear a note of bitterness creeping into her voice. She leans back in her chair and watches Emily reach across the table, pick up a roll, and bite on it distractedly. Her own lips are dry. She feels limp, washed out. She is aware of the faint odor of rotting drains.

Emily has always taken charge of money. She has placed Aunt’s legacy in railways stocks, which have done well. Though appearing so unworldly, almost savagely private at times, she is actually the most practical, the most organized, perhaps even the most intelligent, of the three of them. Certainly this Newby seems to think so. Now she will have this, too: a published novel.

“Besides, you have almost finished your new book,” Emily adds, looking directly at her. “You can always send
Jane Eyre
out, too.”

“Not quite,” Charlotte says, aware of the churlish, petulant sound of her voice. It is true she has recently added several chapters and brought in a new romantic triangle. Jane has discovered that the brother curate, St. John, named after her father’s college at Cambridge, is secretly in love with a beautiful heiress, Rosamund, but will not allow himself to consider marrying into security and a life of ease. He renounces his desire with heroic self-restraint and remains firmly wedded to the Church and to his hard, Christian duty, offering Jane a life of servitude as an instrument in his work.

Charlotte is increasingly interested in such a character, a curate like several she has known, a good man who uses his virtue as a cudgel on those around him, as a means of distinguishing himself from them. He wishes to control Jane, too, to have her follow him to India as a missionary, a fate that would probably kill her. Beneath his quiet, controlled exterior he hides a fever of feelings, but he has no love for her. Jane must choose between love without marriage or marriage without love.

Charlotte cannot see a way out of this dilemma.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

E
mily walks through the kitchen and opens the back door. She understands Charlotte’s hesitation. Outside, the light shimmers above the earth like a halo. The sun is like a balm on her skin. Her geese strut about proudly, glossy in the sunlight, and a flock of blue-and-pearl-necked black pigeons settle onto the ground. She breaks the roll from the breakfast table and scatters it, watching her eager, feathered vassals pecking happily. She looks up into the branches of the cherry tree and remembers climbing aloft, up and up, through the branches and leaves into the blue air, higher and higher, nearer to heaven, for the joy of it. She remembers, too, that moment of surprise, the tumble and fall, the sudden hard earth rising beneath her.

She is not entirely surprised by Newby’s letter. She has always thought Charlotte’s the weakest book of the three, though she has never said so, of course, and they have placed it first in their submission. There is not enough of Charlotte herself in the book. She has distanced herself too much from her text. Despite its title, she has not written about the real professor she loved. Much more of him is in Mr. Rochester. Crimsworth is not sympathetic, a small man tortured by hypochondria and fear of death, who works his way through life with little enjoyment.

Emily has liked
Agnes Grey
ever since hearing Anne read passages aloud. Her younger sister has written so frankly, so scathingly, and so precisely about her experiences as a governess and her love affair with her father’s curate, the good young man, Celia Amelia, as they called him, who has died so young. Who could doubt the sincere, hopeful voice of youthful indignation that expresses all Anne’s opprobrium for the families where she has worked for so little regard?

Emily goes back inside and sits down beside Anne, who adores her, who followed her around as a child, when they made up the kingdom of Gondal together. She is wearing the gray-figured silk frock she has made herself with such difficulty, and her clear face is lit up with this good news. Emily wants her to have this joy in her life.

She knows, as she takes up the letter, rereads this publisher’s words of praise, that her own book is the strongest and the most original. The other publishers who have turned it down and her sisters in their critiques have called its passions too brutal, its people too crude and violent, their natures too relentless and implacable. No one, Charlotte has warned, will want to read something so disturbing and dreary. Why portray such a dark vision of life? She should use more art and less intuition.

They were wrong.

Surely cruelty and endurance are inherent in nature and not inconsistent with the beauty of its vision. Has she not had to beat with her fists even her own dog, who walks at her side, to stop him from leaving his muddy fur on the beds?

With art she has made it all credible. She has structured her book cleverly using double narrators: first Lockwood, a refined man of means and education, removed from the excess of love, who looks on Heathcliff ’s world with a stranger’s eyes; then Nelly Dean, the eminently respectable housekeeper, the practical woman, who knows the story from the inside as only a servant can do.

Heathcliff and Catherine will live on precisely because of their excesses. She knows she has taken risks and ventured into wild territory. She will gladly expand her book from the one volume into two. She already knows how to do this: she will add another generation. Newby has had the good sense to appreciate her secret strength. She will rework the time sequence to get it quite right for him. She will accept his offer.

She has reproduced events in the lives of those in her own family and of those she has learned about through the local gossips. She has described the places she knows so well: the interiors, the beloved landscape with all its savage beauty, its waste of heath, its wild sheep, its silence. She has written about property, money, position, and the power they give, which will anchor her book in reality. She knows firsthand the dangers of losing ancestral land to a usurper, the cuckoo in the nest, the dark-skinned gypsy, the wild vision that is part of her and that risks destroying her. She has written about the deep bonds of two lonely, feral children: a dark-skinned orphan boy and a bright girl, both left free to explore the wild land around them and their wild hearts within. She has rendered the passion of childhood on the page.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

C
harlotte says she will help with the breakfast dishes. She rises from the table, turns her face away, and leaves her two sisters to compose their letter alone. She goes into the kitchen to help the elderly servant.

Anne watches her go. She hears Charlotte say, “I’ll do this. You sit down. You shouldn’t be on your feet with such a bad leg.”

“Poor Charlotte, what will she do now?” Anne whispers to Emily, who does not respond. Anne imagines Charlotte helping their old servant, who cannot see the potato eyes to peel them anymore. Anne sighs, but she cannot help feeling happy.

All her life, as the youngest child of six, Aunt’s little pet, surrounded by her family’s protective love, she has been made to feel helpless and dependent—a little nothing in her brilliant brother’s eyes. Living at home, taught by Aunt and her older sisters and occasionally her father, she had little intercourse with the wider world, apart from a few tea parties with sheep farmers or the trades-people of the vicinity, before she went out, first as a student to Roe Head and then as a governess. Yet she has always watched people closely, just as she watches Emily now, pushing her hair back from her face and writing this important letter for both of them without hesitation, pressing down hard on her pen.

What a complex person this sister is, someone whom Anne has never entirely understood, part of whom has always escaped her. Yet Anne has often felt she understood more than both her older sisters, or even her brother, about human nature. Being the youngest, one learns to watch, to copy, to adapt, and to say what will please. One becomes the messenger between the older children, the diplomat.

“If we make any money, we must share it with her,” Anne adds.

“Of course we will,” Emily says.

Anne feels generous, gracious, giving. She loves the whole world, especially her eldest sister, the one who has not been chosen, but she avoids her joyless, sensible face.

She looks around the small dining room, at the empty fireplace, the rocking chair, the dark sofa where black-and-white Flossy lies, the sunlight coming in the window and lighting up the leaves of the geraniums in the windowsill, and she thinks she has the right to a little happiness. She has worked so hard to try to give an honest description of the life of a governess: the hard work, the humiliation, and the miserable conditions she has had to bear for all these years. Teaching is surely the most trying, the most humiliating, of occupations when pupils have no respect for their teacher.

She has been able to overcome her natural repugnance and shame in that position. She has left this home, these beloved sisters, and confronted her ungrateful pupils year after year, trying to maintain her dignity and belief in her own integrity. All her hopes for love and happiness with the man she adored have been lost. She fears she will never have the joy of marriage, will never be able to educate children, as she would have known how to if she had been given the authority to protect them from the harms of alcohol and drugs, as her brother never was. But she will have the satisfaction of seeing her small book in print and knowing that someone will read her words—some other poor young woman, perhaps, someone sent out as she has been, alone, friendless, and put upon, who will know she is not entirely alone.

Why did the man she loved have to die so young? She wishes she could share her good fortune with her father’s young curate. She sees him sitting across from her pew in the church, feels his gaze on her, sees his bright smile, hears his sunny voice. There was a lightness, a playfulness, a joy about him. She sees Emily at the piano playing Schubert Lieder while he sang, leaning toward her, his tenor voice sweet and caressing. She had not imagined that she would react to his death as she has. Sometimes she has moments of forgetfulness, almost as though he had never entered her life, and sometimes of anger, and then a memory will return like this with violence.

Would he ever have declared his love? How she had waited for him to come to her that summer at Scarborough. But in her book she has written that scene on the beach. She has described the burst of violet-blue, the glinting breakers, the sea mews sporting above. She has rendered the sun-dazzled moment when her heroine sees him walking toward her across the sand in the early morning light. She has had the satisfaction of making the beloved curate arrive unexpectedly, of transforming her dreams into reality on the page. She has given her readers, too, that joy and hope. Now they will have her words in print forever.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A
nne can hear her brother’s groans and stumbling footsteps on the stone stairs. He is coming down slowly and staggering into the dining room, his hand hovering over his half-closed eyes. “The light!” he moans. “Close the shutters! Help me,” he begs. Anne puts a cautionary hand on her sister’s arm. Emily immediately folds the letter she is writing, as well as the one they have received, and slips them into her book. She raises her eyebrows at Anne, who gets up to help their brother into the room, the dogs sniffing around him. He leans on her shoulder and seems to sink. He sits down, resting his head on Emily’s shoulder. Anne fulfills his request, and the sunlit room is suddenly dim. The dogs slink into the corner, wary.

Their brother knows nothing about this publishing venture. How could they tell him? Proud and audacious beyond his station, he had puffed himself up with dreams of glory and had accomplished so little. Besides, he no longer has any discretion. They have all feared he might blurt out, in one of his drunken fits, their
noms de plume
, which are so important to preserving their anonymity. She looks down at him as he leans his body against Emily, lolling on her shoulder, while she brushes his hair back from his face and strokes his forehead. With his stained shirt, wrinkled trousers, bare feet, and wild hair, he knows so little about them.

Anne picks up the book with the letters and slips it onto her lap as she sits down. She cannot help wondering what he would do if he were to find out that she, the little nothing, has been offered a contract for her first novel. For a moment she is tempted to blurt it out, to crow, to confront him with the reality of his wasted life, the wreck of his talent, the ruin of his promise, the terrible suffering he has brought to all of them.

He sits before her with his head in his hands and asks where his father has gone. “I’m afraid I gave the poor old man another bad night,” he says with a half grin. She says that while he was sleeping soundly, their father went out early. She turns her gaze away from her brother, his mass of unkempt red hair floating wildly about his gaunt forehead, his hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. He looks so thin he seems to be wearing someone else’s clothes.

Emily comes in with a tray with the coffee, a glass of new milk, a toasted oatcake, butter. “Come, drink the milk while it is still warm—eat. You must eat something, darlingheart,” she says, and puts her hand on his shoulder, concern in her gaze. He has probably not eaten for days, lying on his bed upstairs, but he says he does not want anything to eat, pushing away the tempting plate, lifting the cup of black coffee to his lips with a trembling hand. He complains of a headache, a wild din in his head, strange noises. “I hear a constant buzzing. You cannot imagine the night I have passed. Horrible things flash before my eyes,” he complains, and stares at them with the frightened expression of a child. Emily takes the tray back into the kitchen, leaving Anne with her brother.